Remembering sunlight on the steepled square,
Remembering April's way with little streets,
And pouter pigeons coasting down the air,
Spilling a beauty, like white-crested fleets,—
I have imagined, in these pain-racked days,
The look of grasses thrusting through the earth,
Of tender shoots along green-bordered ways,
Of hedges, and their first, frail blossoming mirth.
I have imagined, too, in some such wise
Death may allow, within her darkened room,
Some subtle intimation of wide skies,
Of startled grasses, and the hedge in bloom,—
And we may know when some far spring comes down,
Wearing her magic slippers through the town.
II
FEVER
The cool, sweet earth is cool and sweet indeed,
To flesh that fever makes a cinder of,—
An angel with cool hands to cup his need,
In ministrations, kinder yet than love.
There, a cool cheek to lay against his own,
And rest for that hot blood's too restless will,
His hands to curve on root or clod or stone;—
And deep-dug earth is very, very still.
Yet some, remembering happiness he had
Of living things, of leaf and sun and air,
Could pity him his prison, and be sad,—
Not knowing how he is companioned there,
Nor how, for such as he and his great need,
The cool, sweet earth is cool and sweet indeed.
III
RUINS
The spring comes in to me like spring in Rome,—
As year by year those ruins, dead to mirth,
Sense a strange quickening in the sweetened loam,
Where new, returning Aprils take the earth;
Something they lost, so many centuries gone,
Something too swift and subtle for a word,
Is half-remembered—in a shattered faun,
A stained and broken bird-bath, and its bird.